What an incredibly horrid finish to this series. Cooper's style is very readable and often even humorous. The research that went into the series is impressive. She does an excellent job of integrating daily details of life in England during the war that are so often overlooked in these historical novels. On that front, the series deserves praise. Her characters are real and relatable, especially Sophie. But the moral choices and lifestyles of practically everyone in this book are so skewed. They live their lives without any regard for something greater than themselves. Virtue or principles are something to be laughed at, a product of a now by-gone age. God has absolutely no place in their lives (for those of them that even deign to acknowledge his existence). Abortions, one-night stands (and was that ever a sickening scene) and a threesome marriage wherein one man marries a woman, but he is gay and they have a bi-sexual man living with them and carrying on a relationship with both of them and they have two kids, one by each man. I have no words to describe this. These pictures will have to suffice.

Why? Really? I suppose it only shows how utterly astray everything goes when we take God, when we take the transcendent and the eternal, out of the equation. But it makes for an utterly depressing and dejecting experience to read about this. The war is of course a dark and cruel time period, but to show only the darkness and death - to ignore the possibility of hope and growth from these events - is not a true portrayal of the period, much less life. I know many others did not see this darkness. They found that for them the series ended looking with hope to the future, but that was not what I felt when I closed the cover.